political procedures in a place where the sun shines more than $320.00 days a year. solar panels could solve the electricity problem. but it is the israeli occupation that's preventing the palestinian goals of energy, self reliance, new deborah, him and just either be occupied left bank. ah, it's good to have you with a solo, a dream sitting here in doha, the headlines on our 0, the u. k. as prime minister barak johnston has confirmed the 1st death from the u cove at 19 o micron variant, the you case health secretary says that at least 20 percent of new infections in england a caused by alma cron. i think the idea that this is somehow a milder version of the virus. i think that's something we need to say on one side and just recognize the sheer pace or which it accelerates through the population.

so the best thing we can all do is get our boosters or it me up centers across the country. we're getting in the army to, to help with the logistics. we're expanding in every possible way. and what we need now is for the public to respond and to do that do what is necessary get boosted. now the governor of the us state of kentucky says that 64 people are known to have died and fridays tornadoes. more than a 100 people are still on, accounted for. he was president joe biden has declared an emergency in the state at approved aid for 5 of us. just a few more facts about those we've, we've lost our 18 are still on identified of the ones that we now the age the age range is 5 months to 86 years and sex or younger than

18 help keeps pouring in from all over the country i thank you to every one, how we feel you love security forces in sudan if he was tear gas to this past protested in the capitol demonstrate his or against last month's deal with the military, which so the prime minister was reinstated in denmark, a former minister has been sentenced to 60 days in prison from immigration policies while in government. english storybook, maggie told at the separation of under aged refugee couples when she was immigration minister, hong kong media mogul, jimmy lyons, 7 of us have been sentenced to 14 months in prison for participating in a band vigil last year. lie says, he's proud to be punished for commemorating victims of china's 1989. $200.00 men square crackdown was the headless. won't you see here now to 0 after inside story

coming up next. ah. cove at 19 continues to take its toll on people and the economy locked down to come and go, borders close and reopen and the new immigrant variance creating more uncertainty. so how can we deal with the economic implications of an open ended pandemic? this is inside story. ah hello, i'm come out. santa maria, it was march 11th of 2020

a year and 9 months ago. give or take a few days when the word pandemic essentially took over our lives. and really can we say there's an end in sight covered? 19 infections are rising again and health officials, erosion, countries to speed up their vaccination drives to contain new outbreaks and the spread of more dangerous mutations. it is not a great picture. and what 2020 tort house is that the global economy cannot afford to take again, the kind of hits it took last year. and the international monetary fund says the economy is expected to recover even as the pandemic research is. but the speed of the recovery that is tied to strong policy changes not just by individual countries, but at multi lateral levels. the uncertainty means predictions can change at any time, of course, which ends up affecting future investments. and while every day people hold on to their savings, so markets keep climbing despite all of that real world, trouble. the impact of the pandemic is hid economies differently,

but some effects have been felt while pretty much the same in all countries. millions of people losing their jobs when businesses before to close during the initial wave of the pandemic, global supply chains still severely disrupted. as a result of staff shortages, many ports clogged with shipments, causing supply shortfalls and rising prices. and international monetary fun predicts the cost of the basics, food and gas will rise 4.3 percent this year. the biggest jump we've seen since 2011. ah. what we can't solve all the world's problems. what we can talk about them with our 3 guest starting in johannesburg with lorenzo. if you're a monte, who is a professor of political economy, the university of pretoria and the founding director at the center for the study of governance, innovation in london, vicky price chief economic adviser at the c e. b r, the center for economics and business research and a former u. k. government advisor. and in she's walker. we have suggest takesha,

who is the dean of the school of management at the university of she's rocha and i thank all 3 of you for joining us. today as a say, i don't think we're going to solve everything, but we can maybe figure out which sort of direction we're going in the run. so i'd like to start with you, primarily because of your title. you look at political economy and i've always thought of this pandemic. certainly the reactions to this pandemic as being almost politics versus economics. political decisions versus. busy economic ones has that been the problem, but it's a problem with everything. it's all been politicized. well, i think the politicization of depend on my kids is becoming more and more evidence . and i think mostly in the 2nd phase, the 2nd year at the beginning, we were taken by surprise. you know, no one knew exactly what to do. but what is surprising is that after 2 years of having lived with the buyers and having a global economy, having global institutions were still acting as if it was the 1st day that could happen after south africa discovered the barrier. and, you know,

the whole world panicked, they closed down flights, no word, no global institutions. that to, you know, that, that, that initiated that he was a unilateral moved by some countries without even making a phone call without even coordinating, under most basic saying, having an enormous in negative impact on the economy, probably for no reason. so why did i do it? okay, you just said you've just been a reason. but why is it just nature reactions? is it, is it, is it almost nationalism and protectionism by country said whoa, we just got a shut down. we got to lock it down. i think so, i think it's an e jerk reaction. it's a lot of matures and it's the fact that perhaps we have to realize we don't really have a system of global governance that is in place. i think no one takes the world health organization seriously. and governments do what day, what they feel, you know, what they feel is right. they don't even listen to science anymore. you know, scientists have said from the very beginning, what hold on this parent may actually not be so severe in actually get good news

because maybe we haven't, you dominant virus, which it brings about a much milder disease. right? so that's what you want. you want to turn a pandemic internet botanic that's it's already eaten endemic. that's what we said from the very beginning. and yet governments acted motivated by panic. i don't think there is a conspiracy behind it, but that is even more scary that we are globally run as if we didn't really have a global institutional system for wiki price in london, you used to advise the u. k. government, what? but how did you feel that i've done a few between just during the pandemic itself, but what you know, was the government really listening to the advice and the potential outcomes of, of locked downs and other such a border closures? well, the interesting thing in the u. k certainly is that the scientists were calling for tied to measures a little bit before they the sort of on the current very variance impact was

properly calculated. so they had been dis, concerned that things were getting slightly worse, that cases would be picking up in the winter. and they had already been, of course, some increased travel restrictions that were coming along. in addition to what we've seen more recently, which is go back to working from home as much as you possibly can. and the discussions that we having about cov, if possible, and so on. so i would suggest that in this case, the politicians here would say we have been listening to the science even though, as has just been said, maybe the only current variant isn't as dangerous as people had thought in terms of its impact. even though it's obviously spreading a lot, but what has been happening because of the concerns that we're ready surfacing in various areas we have seen in europe, certainly the netherlands and, and other countries tightening up quite significantly. we saw that in austria within you locked down the cannot make situation is obviously looking

a little bit weaker and most forecast is where we're ready revising their expectations both 420-214-2022 downwards. even before the latest. where is surface in the sort of serious way we're getting there in any get you would hope there, vicki? we have moved past mass lock downs harsh lock downs and you i was listening to vac murphy, the u. s. surgeon general. he was saying, you know, that was our only weapon in 2020, at the start of the pandemic. that's all we had. we locked down. now, we've got, obviously vaccines and we've got, hopefully experience. we should move past those run, especially having seen the economic impact. what a substitute to that, of course, i mean the vaccines have been very significant and the fact that now everyone is trying to get a 3rd booster as well. and that's been happening also across europe is a real positive step. now nevertheless, i think what governments are doing is using right now just thing,

but politics it but as a threat to closures and passports as a way to encourage all the unvaccinated to get vaccinated and those who have not had the boosters to do so as quickly as possible by reducing the date that the agent which you start having the boosters initiated, which is what's going on right now. so it's going back to all the adults, not just those over 50 or 60 or those are the 40 that we saw. now, the target here is every adult should be asked to have a boost of at the end of this month, which is december. so, i mean, that's a big, big issue really because what it means is that indeed, if you do get those boosters, then as you suggest that there's love dams make very little sense. let's bring somebody to talk to you then to our conversation of you from asia there. i actually haven't heard an awful lot about the situation in japan recently. it was all the headlines, obviously leading up to and during the postpone to limit games. how are things

there now? well, it has simmered down quite considerably if you look at the, the amount of number of people who are contracted with over 19. it's well under 50 per day. so we're doing a very good job here. but the negative implication that's been cause on the economic side, we all know that, you know, the interest rates tend to get depressed compared to the natural rate by approximately 0.5 to 1.5 percent over span of well over 1020 years. meaning that there will be a continuous spread of inequality, which is what a lot of people talk about, but particularly in japan, which is a very much of area tearing society so. so basically among c o, c nations, japan has a very low amount of gap of inequality. but that said, people are extremely sensitive about this. so this also connects not only to the

economic side, but the political motives. and i think there was a very good in expression that was said by the gentleman about, you know, government being motivated by the coven 19. but we're getting a, quite a lot of policy changes that are being enhanced, which obviously affect the economy. and, and it's not only that, there's also a vast change of, of distribution chain that's taking place right now. basically, due to the fact that we're getting a big war of a given a, between the united states and china and japan obviously being swirled into this. oh yeah, let me interrupt you. john quickly said, your thing is, you've brought up the issue, all of our supply chains and the light. this has been a product of the pandemic. people got laid off. it couldn't keep up with the work. now the demand is picking up. now you're getting shipped stuck out because there's not enough people to do all the work she has. is there a bigger lesson?

has there been a bigger lesson learned here about how we do business about how we tried about how we ship. i know we're a very into connected well, but stuff still has to get from a to be physically. well, the answer is yes and no. yes, we have to start to introduce, you know, and thrown away the old status quo of methodology in doing business. but at the same time, again, this coven 19 has basically given a lot of wake up goal, in particular to the, i would say, nations that had been oil or the alarmed by the aggression by the chinese. so basically people are walking away from just in time system to just in case system from j i t into j i. c. which theoretically, might sound very good because people want to prepare for, you know, issues like, you know, coven 19. but from the economic theoretical point of view, that's suicide,

you want to increase your inventory when your demand is unclear. but again, the geopolitical factor is winning out the economic factors. because obviously we all understand the threat that has been displayed by the chinese government. so obviously we're seeing this coven, 19 issue, having a very big indirect impact on a geopolitical side, which directly impacts our supply chain, which directly impacts our economic situation. oh, and then let's try something else. i'll just direct missed all 3 of you. then come to you one by one inflation. i mean, joe biden has admitted and said this is a problem. he thinks it will start to come down quickly, but it's, it's, it's a scary prospect, isn't it? lorenzo? i'll start with you. when you're by 6 stop to come, move out of reach your food and you're petrol in the light. absolutely, and there was a, for some time, you know, there was this idea that inflation was temporary. and you know,

like even the european central bank, for instance, you know, like assumed that it was a temporary change in was believe to be a law inflation scenario. now we understand that this is not going to be the case. the inflation is back back for many reasons. one of them is mostly, you know, like commodity prices, energy prices, and so on and so forth. but i think again, you know, what we're seeing is a perfect store, potentially perfect storm, you know, like of inflation rising and economic depression at the same time. that's why in this, at this point in time after 2 years of a, an unprecedented path and damage in our generation who you would have expected governments to have learned the lesson. what on the previous speaker was saying is extremely important. you can't do business when you don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow after what happened with on a chrome. and i keep saying this, not only because i'm based in south africa because i've seen how little thinking went into it. now, business people all over the world are going to probably think what's gonna happen if there's and you, are we going to see this again?

are we going to, this is didn't see this erotic behavior again, walden would expect, of course, know the global governance is going to work. you know, there will be parents that we can notations to. maybe in 2 years. time is going to be not a virus. what are we going to do? we're going to shut down a planet every time. what will you do? you would expect to see governance institutions step in and say, hold on guys. we do have protocols. we do have technologies. we now have systems. we're a mature society, we're not let by, you know, like sentiments where i'm led by gut feelings. and this is precisely what is not happening. so my hope is that we have learned the lesson now. and i that the flight band, a travel band is relieved, immediately lifted. and also that we learned that in a complex world, you need to have a functioning global governance system to operate. and you cannot just simply go back to inward looking nationalism is when that happens, then we expect it to happen again. and economics is all about perceptions. if

perceptions are negative, that's what it what you're going to get. okay, vicki, i, i, i like what lorenzo are saying that the idea that we have to look at this obviously is a much bigger picture in an, a global picture. the problem though, i see with quote unquote global governance. is that and this is really simplistic, but every once different, all leads to 100 or so countries in the world are very different. they have very different needs. and there is this protection, as i mentioned, it before, this nationalism which has no, we got to look after our own 1st. now that's understandable. how do you, how do you get global governance in past that sort of thinking? well, the interesting thing is though, that if you look at what each of the big countries have done, they're the ones in the west. they put huge amounts of money into the economy. and in an interesting way for me, it facilitate to trade to operate in, in almost near normal. so what, what the w t o, the world trade organization? what was going to happen in 2020 was that we might see a drop as they thought the time of between 13 and 32 percent. i remember correctly

in the world trade. in fact, that full was much less. it was about 5 percent. and what we seeing in 2021 is a huge increase in trade dies taking place, which has kept quite a lot of nations going. so 1st of all, there was this huge and which of fiscal stimulus that we saw happening. second, we had big monetary injection in many countries, which then of course, are, you know, help hugely with demand as it started developing again. and i think that has helped quite a lot of countries which have benefited from high commodity prices in terms of if that was the export that they were involved in. mostly. so the did reasonably well, because you seen oil prices go up and so on, but that has been because this extra stimulus and money that was put into the world economy, if you like, a lead to demand being really rather strong and supply not being able to respond so before we come to depressed. the reality is that of course,

because inflation high because of those circumstances when you suddenly increase demand, without supply being able to respond, that's where you'd get to him. but also if you look at the forecasts for world growth for next year, they're still pretty positive. we're not talking about depression. yeah. we're talking about still very substantial growth, which will have made up actually for the fall of 2020. yeah. of 2022. seeing, as you mentioned, that i got i m f numbers here from their projection and october where they were talking about global growth this year of almost 6 percent and almost 5 percent next year. all up from minus 3 percent in 2020. so all of that, maybe you can explain 5 years, is that a good and be sustainable? that's important because you've talked about lots of money being pumped into the system, vicki, which is great, but you can't keep doing that. and as absolutely true, and that's exactly what's going on right now. for example, the u. s. is reducing the, the amount of bonds it's buying back in from the market every year. if you remember,

it's been something like $120000000000.00 worth of bonds has been buying since about march 2020 every month. i mean this huge amount and it's reducing that now it started doing so from november. and that is reducing that by about $15000000000.00 a month so, but the middle of next year is not going to be buying anything any more. now that may change a little bit if the economy slows down, but, but we have seen is indeed there is a little bit of withdrawal of monetary support taking place right now. but also the same time what is happening is that they are looking again at maybe not increasing interest rates, anything like as fast as they would have done otherwise. so we're not talking about things really tied names. hugely. we're talking about the, the, the central banks being much more careful right now in terms of what they perceive the economy might be doing in the future and being therefore,

once again there to make sure the economies do not suddenly get into that depression. that perhaps some people feel may happen, other was sort of stuck flash and nobody likes, but i think they wanted to restore it. is an fiscal artist seem to be quite prepared to stand around for a little bit longer and watch this space for like an act if necessary. so videos nodding their in his work. i do want to jumpin. well yes, i think um, if i may add one more thing, i think the international court nations amongst the central banks have been become a lot more eloquent than that say they can to ago. so obviously we can have the mutual, i would say, a corporate of this that could kick in all. and also we must have that considering the fact that, you know, most of these advance nations have really swelled up on their depth. so obviously to sustain a calamity or i should say calmness within the financial market is

a must particular for countries like japan where you know, our debt to g p will, over 200 percent. and our demographics clearly showing their birth rate is only 1.34, and the fact that you know, our senior citizen is going to have a majority in, in 2025. obviously, you know, the rise of interest rate will be in armageddon scenario. and certainly it's not only for to remember the rest of the world as well, and especially under the situation where we're talking about a lot of spending, but not where the money is coming from. as i look at all 3 of you here, just reminded me the fact that you are all at home, you're all, either in a living room or a home study and you're on skype or 0. this is obviously been one of the big changes that we've seen in the last year and a half. i wonder if i could get just from each of you in the range. i'll start with you, just a view from your part of the world. of changes, did people stay at home have the i feel people have just actually started heading

back to the office again and that maybe we didn't learn a lesson there and really change our thinking on how we work and how we communicate lorenzo. you festival. i think a lot of people have changed colors. people want to keep the change. a lot of people have are taking more seriously what the, what the pandemic is offering us in terms of making our jobs more sustainable, having a lot smaller, you know, like the less negative impact on the climate. but we also have to understand that a lot of the, the experiences that we have are for go to privileged, you know, like there are a lot of people here in south africa for instance, that don't have to luxury of working from home. they're likelihood depend on what happens out there on the street in small businesses, micro, micro enterprises and some so forth. we have forgotten about that. i think people to this conversation when forgotten about the fact that the vaccination program is not working, but belief that a lot of people in africa are not vaccinated and they are not vaccinated. not because they don't want to get vaccinated, but because the countries of the north,

the rich countries at bol, the vaccine to vaccinate, even people that don't need it. because know they're vaccinating the, you know, like new borns and the babies when, even the maddox maddox in africa are not vaccinated, doctors are not vaccinated. healthcare officials are not vaccinated, let alone the citizens. so this is what i'm talking about. when i say this, pandemic has shown a lot of selfishness and is self defeating selfishness because at the end of the day, world suffering from new mutations in your parents coming from those countries where people haven't been vaccinated and who would have expected something totally different. and eventually, economy would benefit from it because if we were able to get rid of this to turn it into an endemic something that you can manage, we could go back to having a much better. they, you know, like an economic trajectory at the same time, retain good things we have learned during this past 2 years, vicki just quickly and then it's such as quickly as well. what's things like in london, the keep it on? no, of course johnson has told people to stop working from home again, but before that, i mean with just heading back again. of them certainly. well, the keeps

a beginning, the underground was beginning to get quite full and, and people are really shane going out again and also meeting with a colleague. so, but that was a bit of a hybrid situation that had developed. so most people would go into the office for just a few days a week. quite a lot of work from home still happened, but just to learn just saying it is a big, big issue because a number of people don't have the luxury have not been able to do that. and what you found during condemning itself is that the higher you get paid, well, you got paid, the more likely it was the task that you were doing. there was a bigger share of the stuff you can do from home. the lower pay scale, people either lost the job so had to go out to still do face to face job security and sort of delivery takeaways and what have you. so he has created a bit of inequality without me. said you are 30 seconds with your house, things they're going back to work or not. well, we are, but you know, i'd like to basically hope that this will continue in the sense that, you know,

new methodology, new ideas breaking the ice type of, you know, issues will continue because one of the problems of japan have always had, is sticking accessory to status quo. yeah. so you know, hybridization work, i think is certainly something that is welcomed and should be perpetuated from your own words. so do i talk a sheet, vicky price lorenzo to monte. thank you so much for your time and your thoughts? did i really appreciate it? and thank you, as well for watching is always more on line out 0 dot com. you can visit us, you can catch up on any of our previous editions. or you can at facebook dot com forward slash ha, inside story as well. for more discussion on twitter at ha, inside story. i'm at kamala j. e. if you want to drop me line. thanks for joining us and come out santa maria from the hole inside the story team. good bye for now. almost egan said, ah

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